Silent Singer
by mayelbrid
Summary: Vaire the weaver, the silence in the eternal song.


Clad in grey, a hazy and diaphanous fabric that reminds more of mist than it does of any solid substance, her pale face veiled and her pale hands never still, she works.  
  
Seated at the feet of her silent husband in the darkness and the endlessness of their ever widening halls, she toils.  
  
The wheel clicks and whirrs under her quick fingers. Their tips are bloodied and raw and scarlet stains the shimmering-silver webbed chain she weaves, but this does not matter. Her existence is all bound to this work, her breath and her life and her blood given to it, part of it. She sat at her spindle when the first child of Iluvatar opened pale eyes and stared out, uncomprehending, into the evernight. She will cease to spin only when the last living creature has been finally gathered into Namo's long embrace.  
  
Her work is the tale of years, of lives. It is everything that will be, and all there ever was. Every creature conceived upon this earth adds a thread to the woven chain she creates and each breath it draws is recorded there. Every word ever spoken, every intention never realised can be read in Vaire's twisted silver cord.  
  
New lives bring new patterns to the work, new shades. The faint shimmering light the twine of threads lends to the long corridors and high walls of Mandos' chamber is tinged with highlights of many hues. The fire-brand red of Feanor and his children gives way to the gleam of a golden sunset where she they called Tinuviel's life winds into the weave, and all are encompassed by the multitudes of lives of men, all silver, though some are faint, some mithril bright. Some lives have been spun into the chain from the first, binding hundreds of threads together with theirs, and still continuing. Some are barely begun before they are ended, as Vaire lifts one bone white hand, fingers curled around golden scissors with edges sharp as adamant.  
  
No sooner is a thread severed than Vaire bends again over her spinning wheel, at work once more. At her back, standing before his throne in all his dark glory, her husband, doomgiver, opens wide his arms.  
  
Wars rage through the overlapping latticework of the silken chain. Cities are founded, and lost, and rebuilt in the ashes of what was, that in time they may grow great and fall once more. All things begun are woven there, and all things that will end. The cord is wet with tears unnumbered, and cold in memory of a million dying breaths. Soft as the translucent skin of a babe newborn and unending as the depths of the eyes of the fallen, which, new in death, may see nothing and everything at once.  
  
Vaire herself knows this otherwise transient state well, both knowing and unknowing. Every tale ever told is spun into her weaving, history and future both reside in it's layered coils. A turn of the wheel, and riddles are exchanged, another sees a dragon defeated. As she weaves, a ring slips underwater and into the unknown.  
  
Every note of the eternal song she may play, its harmonies slide through her fingers as she spins. But Vaire is blind. Beneath her veil, set into a face that could rival that of Varda star-setter in it's fragile beauty, her eyes are colourless. Milky clouds drift across their vacant surfaces and she sees not at all.  
  
Her lips, high-arched and just touched by the pale pink of a winter's dawn, will part for breath but not speech, for mute she is, and deaf.  
  
The silence in the great song, no children will Vaire carry to speak the truths of her work, for she wed a husband whose touch is the End.  
And yet, she feels not alone, nor shut off from this world she weaves day and night. She sings and sees and speaks with her fingertips and through her work she is bound to every creature and may take a share in every joy, and also every sorrow. She may see through the eyes of multitudes and speak through a choir of innumerable voices.  
  
Around the interlocking chain of all life, she weaves her own. It's light is woven into the fabric of every soul and joins them, one to the other, connecting past and future. Yesterday flows into tomorrow through this spiderweb of life. All secrets are caught in it's links, to be read only by the few and the favoured.  
  
The weaver may run a careful finger over her yarn and, in the golden light of a wood out of time with it's world, an elven Lady might cast her eyes down to the silver haze of her mirror and, featherlight, feel Vaire's gentle hands spinning her soul.


End file.
